Starting an unpopular opinions thread because I’m tired of the consensus takes. I’ll share mine and I want yours.
My unpopular opinion: Figma made designers worse at design.
Before the workflow became all-in on Figma, designers spent more time with the problem - sketching, thinking, exploring low-fidelity options before committing to pixels. Now the tool is so fluid that people go to high-fidelity too fast, fall in love with a specific execution, and can’t see the underlying problem anymore.
The prototype is the idea now instead of representing an idea.
Also: good design portfolios have gotten more homogeneous in the last three years. Everyone is solving the same three problem formats (fintech app redesign, e-commerce UX, wellness app) in the same visual language (clean sans serif, soft neutrals, rounded corners). The sameness makes all of it forgettable.
I have more but I want yours first. What do you think that you know most people will push back on?
Unpopular opinion: designing at 1x resolution is a skill and working at 2x on everything is making people bad at visual decision-making at actual display sizes. So much work looks good in Figma at 200% zoom and falls apart when you actually look at it on a phone.
The Figma point lands for me. I’ve started deliberately sketching for the first day of any project regardless of timeline pressure. The ideas that come out of rough sketching are consistently different from what emerges when I go straight to the tool.
Unpopular: Case study presentation has become more important than the design work itself for portfolio evaluation. Someone with mediocre work and an excellent case study structure gets hired over someone with excellent work and poor presentation. The format is being gamed.
@felixcreativeguy the portfolio homogeneity observation is real and the reason is that everyone learned design from the same YouTube videos, courses, and portfolio review channels. When the educational inputs are identical the outputs converge.
Unpopular opinion I’ll stand by: simplification is overrated as a design principle. The “simplify everything” instinct removes complexity that was doing useful cognitive work. Sometimes the thing that looks busy is doing more for the user than the clean version that replaced it.